Andrew Parker - The Genesis Enigma: Why the Bible Is Scientifically Accurate

Table of Contents

TO MY SON, LORENZO

PREFACE

It has been said many times, by rational people who believe in God, that the truth of the stories in the book of Genesis is not to be measured by their agreement with the facts of modern astronomy and biology. Rather, it is argued, their truth is bound up with their effectiveness in explaining for the Old Testament writers the origin and destiny of the world and humanity in the light of their belief in God. In other words, the creation account at the beginning of Genesis helped the ancient Israelites who produced it to cope with and understand their world. In some way, this story of how they and their world came about satisfied their inner consciousness. But no one in more recent times would ever have considered that this creation account could be scientifically accurate, which is why modern theologians have felt compelled to arm themselves for debate with the rationalization above.

Things may be about to change.

In this book I will be arguing that the latest understanding of how the world and all life on it came to develop and evolve, as demonstrated by solid, evidence based science, reflects exactly the order of events as set out in Genesis. It is the culmination of a most extraordinary and unanticipated chain of events that began in 1990 at the Australian Museum in Sydney, where I worked under the auspices of Drs. Jim Lowry, Noel Tait, Penny Berents, and Pat Hutchings. I had set out to describe a whole new community of crustaceans known as seed shrimps, but soon became distracted byliterallya flash of green light. The seed shrimps were producing iridescence, but according to the literature they were not supposed to. Investigating further, I found that the bright color resulted from diffraction gratings on the animals antennae. Diffraction gratings consist of very fine parallel grooves in a surface; they are what cause, for instance, the color seen in holograms on credit cards. They were well known to physicists, but hitherto unknown in nature. This itself became another green light to look for moreand I found lots more, thanks to my job at the museum, where I spent several years observing all the major groups of animals represented in tropical seas.

The authority on seed shrimps was Professor Lou Kornicker at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. While working with Lou in 1994 I also saw some of the prize possessions of the Smithsonian, the fossils of the Burgess Shale (more about these in chapter 6). The Burgess Shale fossils had become famous for revealing the Big Bang of evolutionan event known as the Cambrian explosionof around 520 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs, when life was exclusively marine. I noticed, in black and white reproductions of these long extinct animals, fine parallel lines drawn on some of their spines and shields. These lines themselves were too coarse to be diffraction gratings; but could they, I wondered, be vestiges of such a feature?

I was given permission to examine the valuable fossils under high powered microscopes, and in three species I did indeed find diffraction gratings. These animals would have sparkled with bright colors when they lived all that time ago. But why? The answer to that lay in the reason why some animals display bright colors todayto send visual messages. Eyes existed in the Burgess Shale animals too, so the visual world and the natural arms race between prey and predator, each with endlessly evolving innovations to give it the edge over the other, could be extended back to at least their era. But how much farther did they extend?

This question led me to search for the first eye to evolve on earth. I found that it had evolved in a group of trilobites, which lived around 521 million years ago. Thats just before the Cambrian explosion began. It was not hard to put two and two together.

In 1998 I published my light switch theory in a scientific journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. This theory holds that it was the sudden introduction of vision in life forms on earth that triggered the Cambrian explosion. Although initially lost in a sea of alternative theories, today the light switch theory not only still holds strong but has become the last man standing in the critiques of experts in the field (such as in a 2007 review by Harvard professor Charles Marshall).

A couple of years later, when I moved to Oxford Universitys Department of Zoology (thanks to Professor Marian Dawkins), I wrote a full exposition of the light switch theory. The result was a popular science book called In the Blink of an Eye: How Vision Sparked the Big Bang of Evolution, published on both sides of the Atlantic in early 2003.

I received numerous letters from readers of this book suggesting something completely unforeseenthat there were parallels between the scientifically generated history of life on earth and the creation account given in the first chapter of Genesis. It was the evolution of visionthe cornerstone of the light switch theorythat had caught their attention, to decipher the ever puzzling biblical phrase Let there be lights... to divide the day from the night (verse 14). This appears after the initial Let there be light or formation of the sun (verse 3). The light switch theory became the final number in a combination lock guarding a biblical secret. Mainly out of courtesy, I gave the matter brief attention. Needless to say, as a scientist I would never entertain the seven day creation story, according to which the universe and all life were supposedly created literally in seven actual days, or other such irrational ideas. So, I wondered, whats all this about scientific accuracy in the book of Genesis?

Without expecting to find anything, I discovered a whole series of parallels between the creation story on the Bibles first page and the modern, scientific account of lifes history. This at least made me think. The congruence was almost exact and it had assembled by accidentit was free of intervention by human hands. Most importantly, I was considering the scientific account firsta detached review of the facts and chronology of evolutionwhich ruled out partiality or clouded judgment.

My thoughts developed when I moved from Somerville College, Oxford, to Green College (now Green Templeton College), later in 2003. At Green College I was fortunate to have the chance to talk to Professor John Lennox over many a lunch and coffee. John is a mathematician, but one with an ardent interest in, and extraordinary knowledge of, religious doctrine and history. He is also well versed in the science versus religion debate, which at the time was becoming more topical than ever. John introduced me to his world, and I was surprised to discover within religion some good sense and logic. He also introduced me to some of his friends from the religious arena, such as professors Alister McGrath and Alan Millard, who left me with much thinking to do. John drew the little religion within me to the tip of my tongue and I decided to look into this Genesis Enigma in more detail. The word enigma arose often during these conversationswe could say Genesis Enigma was born here.

I drew further inspiration from seeing for myself some of the discoveries made in the Holy Land at the British Museum, introduced to me by Jonathan Tubb, who had unearthed some of the artifacts himself. I marveled at the finds and correspondence of Leonard Woolley and T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) at the Palestine Exploration Funds headquarters in London. The defining moment, nevertheless, was probably when I